Washington Square Park (Bughouse Square)
901 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL 60610
Parks
Bughouse Square, across from the Newberry Library, was Chicago’s famed free-speech park. From the 1910s–1960s, poets, preachers, and radicals drew crowds with passionate, unscripted soapbox debates.
Bughouse Square—slang for a mental health facility—was the nickname for Washington Square Park, Chicago’s most famous outdoor free-speech venue from the 1910s to the mid-1960s. Located across from the Newberry Library, it drew crowds and tourists alike for its lively, unscripted debates.
At its peak in the 1920s and ’30s, speakers ranged from poets to preachers, though the revolutionary left dominated the soapboxes with fiery, impassioned discourse.
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